According to Business Insider, “the top 500 retailers earned $3.3 billion from social shopping in 2014, up 26% from 2013, according to the Internet Retailer’s Social Media 500. That is well ahead of the roughly 16% growth rate for the overall e-commerce market in the US.”

Going back to the question I asked above, if your answer is “no”, you should definitely include social media in your overall traffic generation strategy. If not, you will be missing out on a significant source of potential online shoppers.

As your competitors continue to implement a robust social media strategy, it’s critical for your brand to also do the same. You really can’t afford to miss out on the massive opportunity to interact and engage with your audience and prospects on social media.

“Social is driving much bigger increases in retail traffic than any other online channel. Social media increased Internet Retailer’s share of e-commerce referrals nearly 200% between the first quarters of 2014 and 2015.” (Business Insider)

As of November 2016, 86% of adults were using social networking sites in the U.S. (Pew Research)

Numbers don’t lie. They show that there are lots of opportunities for you on social media to connect with a massive audience.

I hope you’re already using social media to promote and market your brands. And to help you even further, I’ve made a list of 5 on-site changes you can do right now to boost your social media traffic.

However, you don’t have to stop at content length alone; there are so many other things you should pay attention to if you want your audience to share your content.

Forget about quantity and focus on quality. It’s often easy to think that more content will increase your search engine ranking and social shares. However, this can only happen when your content is of high quality. One super quality piece of content is infinitely better than five mediocre articles.

See what your readers are most interested in. For your audience to massively share your content on social media, you have to give them exactly what they want. The best way to know this is by reviewing your analytics data so you can easily see what type of content is attracting the most attention. With this, you can create content in the future that better aligns with your audience’s interest.

Find out what your readers have previously shared. Another way to entice your audience to share your content is by taking a clue from the past. Know what type of content they’ve shared in the past and write more of that.

When you write the right type of content, every other thing will automatically fall into place.

2. Use Relevant Images

While trying to create unique, actionable, and high-quality content, don’t be carried away and neglect the enormous benefits of rich media. You should always make it a priority to implement images on your posts.

According to Twitter Media Blog, “adding a photo URL to your tweets can boost retweets by 35%.”

Adding images to your posts will not only boost social media shares, but it will also:

Keep readers longer on your website.

Add more meaning to your points.

Increase the post’s engagements.

Fortunately, with lots of amazing image editing tools like Canva, creating high-quality images for your blog posts has become super easy. You just have to get a good image from any attribution-free photo site like Pexels or Pixabay, and then head over to Canva and beautify it as you wish.

However, if you’re not using a social sharing plugin yet, you’re typically asking them to first copy your link, create some assisted content, open up their preferred social media channel, and then share it.

Not many people will do this.

Make it easy for them.

4. Minimize Your Posting Frequency

Conventional wisdom suggests that you should post fresh content frequently because the search engines reward freshness.

This is undoubtedly a solid strategy, but only applicable if you can maintain quality standards – if your quality slacks a bit, so will your social share counts.

Here’s the most interesting part: You can publish as often as you want on your blog, but you may not wish to push each piece through your social media channels.

Recent research from HubSpot shows that frequently posting to social media networks does not necessarily mean more interactions and engagements.

To understand this more, here’s an excerpt from the post:

However, this is not to say that posting fewer posts on social media is guaranteed to increase engagements… What HubSpot is saying is that your social media posting frequency does not necessarily affect your posts’ engagements.

You should rather focus more on the quality of your posts. Before you push any post harder on social media, make sure it has lots of value and has all the recipes that could trigger shares.

To an extent, this is trial and error. You have to figure out what works for you, and it starts by posting once/day and seeing how it turns out.

The key to massive social media traffic is simply to get as many people as possible to share your posts through their social media channels.

But the problem is often not knowing how to entice more people to share your posts willingly.

The simplest and most effective way to do this is by asking your readers to share your content. Most people that read interesting blog posts often forget to share (even though they wanted to), or they may think there’s no need to share.

Asking them, however, will remind them that sharing is important both to you and to their friends who might also like the post.

Follow the steps below to ask your readers to share your next piece of content:

At the end of each post, make a statement like “If you enjoyed this post, don’t forget to share.”

Email some influencers in your industry and ask if they will share it. As long as your email is short, direct, and you have something worth sharing, the result might be astonishing.

Share the post on social media and ask your followers to help you spread the news by also sharing it with their followers. Always remember that quality is important – if you have something valuable, I bet they’ll (almost) always share it.

Never shy away from asking people to share your posts. If done correctly and politely, it can generate dramatic results.

How To Maximize Your Social Efforts

You may firmly believe that your current social media strategy is working, especially if you’re happy with your results so far.

However, a few key changes on your website may convince you to believe that you’ve only just begun scratching the surface.

I’ve given you five actionable on-site changes that can boost your social media traffic. I hope you’ll try one or all of them in the future.

And when you do, come back here and let me know what the results are! I’ll be waiting for you in the comments!

Like this post? Don’t forget to share it!

Want to level up your social media and blogging game? Here are a few hand-picked articles for you to read next:

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A blog scientist by the mind and a passionate blogger by heart ❤️. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud (Award winning blog), speaker at various international forums.Life motto: Live while you can! Teach & inspire while you could & Smile while you have the teeth.

Right content posts mixed with right visuals does a lot better than just right content across Social media channels. Tools like Canva is really very useful and helps in getting the right visuals… Doing all these rightly in a consistent manner will for sure increase social traffic. I strongly believe that Quality and Consistency should be maintained.

Hi Harsh, There are millions who are relying on the social media to boost their business, and the tips you have shared are amazing. I really appreciate your effort for sharing this fantastic post. Have a good week ahead.

Great tips and I’ve started focusing more on quality as opposed to quantity. I think it’s important to write content that helps solve your reader’s problems, usually, this consists of writing long-form content.

It’s great to see that you’re using the Social Warfare plugin. I use that plugin as well and I love it.

The plugin makes it easy for people to share your content. I can definitely say that my content gets a lot of shares since I started using this plugin.

Thanks for sharing these tips with us. I have no doubt they will help bloggers increase their social media traffic.

Finally a post that describes with more realistic details on how to use social media since I really can’t get any decent traffic from them. Now I have the opportunity to test some good recommendations. Thanks Harsh.

Indeed Webinars are also now days trending when it comes to make more sales of our product, apart from blogging, podcasting and emials, people are now bending towards the webinars. The pros of this is that people can enjoy video learning through live videos and why they should turn in for a particular product.

Hello Kim Barloso, It’s really 100 % true that, If we are doing any kind of online marketing means we cant succeed with a single strategy, I got know many more things from your post it was very useful for me,